Robert Owen's Utopian Communities in 19th Century America

Michael Streich

May 29, 2011

 The family has always held prominence in American History, from colonial New England to the present. It represents the foundation of conservative values despite the fact that every new census reports fewer marriages and an ever increasing number of single-parent families. It thus came as no surprise that in the early 19^th Century Robert Owen’s communitarian experiment was vigorously attacked and, ultimately doomed to failure. Owen’s communities, much like other Utopian experiments at the time, rejected ownership of private property and established religion, community raising of children, and a socialist model of labor and wealth sharing.

 

Owen’s Clash with Established Values in American Society

 

Robert Owen was a Briton and had been successful in the pre-industrial climate in England, setting up model factory communities that paralleled his communitarian views. In the early 19^th Century he brought his ideas to America, even addressing Congress and lecturing across the fledgling nation. In America, this pre-industrial period was a time of great upheaval, culminating in the Panic of 1837.

 

Distressed Americans flocked to the various Utopian communities that emerged out of the tumultuous period. This included the Shakers, Rappites, Mormons, and Transcendentalist experiments. Owen’s communities, however, never took root, perhaps because, as Historian Page Smith writes, they were “intensely secular.” Owen’s rejection of the family as well as established religion was viewed as an attack on basic American values.

 

The Raising of Children in Utopian Communities

 

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were enamored with the communitarianism of Native American cultures, notably the Iroquois Confederacy, which appeared to validate a socialist model. According to anthropology professor Jack Weatherford, “The kinship states of the Indians became in Marxist thought exemplars of primitive communism.” Not only was all property held by the community, but it was the community that was responsible for the raising of children.

 

The rejection of a family unit is traced back to ancient civilizations. The Greek philosopher Plato’s Utopian civilization rejected family. In Sparta, boys were taken at birth to be trained as superb warriors. The ancient practice of infanticide guaranteed healthy and productive citizens. Deceased Yale University professor John Boswell wrote a detailed history of the abandonment of children from the ancient period into the Medieval. (The Kindness of Strangers, Pantheon) Children never occupied the position they do in modern society.

 

The American Family Rooted in New England Protestantism

 

Despite a revolution, independence, and the birth pangs of nationhood, 19^th Century Americans still identified with the Puritan “New Israel.” Jerusalem had been reborn on the shores of a new continent with a mission and vision tied to John Winthrop’s City on a Hill. The cornerstone of that relationship was the family, supported by biblical injunctions.

 

Robert Owen argued against this entrenched social reality. Even the Mormons and Shakers understood this. Shakers practiced a vibrant form of Christianity, albeit out of the mainstream from what they called “the world’s people.” Mormons, despite later acceptance of plural marriage, supported the family structure.

 

Owen’s experiment, centered in New Harmony, failed for a variety of reasons. University of Texas professor Brian J. L. Berry argues that Owen spent little time at the various communities established according to his model but preferred to travel across the country and lecture. Additionally, many joining the community were “freeloaders” and intellectuals without farming experience. Finally, Owen’s attack on family and religion spurred a backlash of anger by Americans wedded to the Protestant ideal of faith and family.

 

Owen returned to Britain but that ideal remained and does so today in Protestant ideology and conservative politics. The core of post-modern concerns regarding “same-sex marriage” is rooted in the historically American notion of family. 

 

Sources:

 

Brian J. L. Berry, America’s Utopian Experiments: Communal Havens From Long-Wave Crises (Dartmouth College, University Press of New England, 1992)

Page Smith, The Nation Comes of Age: A People’s History Of The Ante-Bellum Years, Volume 4 (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1981)

Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: HowThe Indians Of The Americas Transformed The World (Fawcett Books, 1988)

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